# Background Notes: About Chinese

The Chinese Languages

We find it perfectly natural to talk about a language called "Chinese." We say, for example, that the people of China speak different dialects of Chinese, and that Confucius wrote in an ancient form of Chinese. On the other hand, we would never think of saying that the people of Italy, France, Spain, and Portugal speak dialects of one language, and that Julius Caesar wrote in an ancient form of that language. But the facts are almost exactly parallel.

Therefore, in terms of what we think of as a language when closer to home, "Chinese" is not one language, but a family of languages. The language of Confucius is partway up the trunk of the family tree. Like Latin, it lived on as a literary language long after its death as a spoken language in popular use. The seven modern languages of China, traditionally known as the "dialects," are the branches of the tree. They share as strong a family resemblance as do Italian, French, Spanish, and Portuguese, and are about as different from one another.

The predominant language of China is now known as Pŭtōnghuà, or "Standard Chinese" (literally "the common speech"). The more traditional term, still used in Taiwan, is Guóyŭ, or "Mandarin" (literally "the national language"). Standard Chinese is spoken natively by almost two-thirds of the population of China and throughout the greater part of the country.

The term "Standard Chinese" is often used more narrowly to refer to the true national language which is emerging. This language, which is already the language of all national broadcasting, is based primarily on the Peking dialect, but takes in elements from other dialects of Standard Chinese and even from other Chinese languages. Like many national languages, it is more widely understood than spoken, and is often spoken with some concessions to local speech, particularly in pronunciation.

The Chinese languages and their dialects differ far more in pronunciation than in grammar and vocabulary. What distinguishes Standard Chinese most from the other Chinese languages, for example, is that it has the fewest tones and the fewest final consonants.

The remaining six Chinese languages, spoken by approximately a quarter of the population of China, are tightly grouped in the southeast, below the Yangtze River. The six are: the Wu group (Wú), which includes the "Shanghai dialect"; Hunanese (Xiāng); the "Kiangsi dialect" (Gàn); Cantonese (Yuè), the language of Guăngdōng, widely spoken in Chinese communities in the United States; Fukienese (Mĭn), a variant of which is spoken by a majority on Taiwan and hence called Taiwanese; and Hakka (Kèjiā), spoken in a belt above the Cantonese area, as well as by a minority on Taiwan. Cantonese, Fukienese, and Hakka are also widely spoken throughout Southeast Asia.

There are minority ethnic groups in China who speak non-Chinese languages. Some of these, such as Tibetan, are distantly related to the Chinese languages. Others, such as Mongolian, are entirely unrelated.

Some Characteristics of Chinese

To us, perhaps the roost striking feature of spoken Chinese is the use of variation in tone ("tones" to distinguish the different meanings of syllables which would otherwise sound alike. All languages, and Chinese is no exception, make use of sentence intonation to indicate how whole sentences are to be understood. In English, for example, the rising pattern in "He’s gone?" tells us that the sentence is meant as a question. The Chinese tones, however, are quite a different matter. They belong to individual syllables, not to the sentence as a whole. An inherent part of each Standard Chinese syllable is one of four distinctive tones. The tone does just as much to distinguish the syllable as do the consonants and vowels. For example, the only difference between the verb "to buy," mǎi and the verb "to sell," mài, is the Low tone ( ̆) and the Falling tone (`). And yet these words are Just as distinguishable as our words "buy" and "guy," or "buy" and "boy." Apart from the tones, the sound system of Standard Chinese is no more different from English than French is.

Word formation in Standard Chinese is relatively simple. For one thing, there are no conjugations such as are found in many European languages. Chinese verbs have fewer forms than English verbs, and nowhere near as many irregularities. Chinese grammar relies heavily on word order, and often the word order is the same as in English. For these reasons Chinese is not as difficult for Americans to learn to speak as one might think.

It is often said that Chinese is a monosyllabic language. This notion contains a good deal of truth. It has been found that, on the average, every other word in ordinary conversation is a single-syllable word. Moreover, although most words in the dictionary have two syllables, and some have more, these words can almost always be broken down into single-syllable units of meaning, many of which can stand alone as words.

Written Chinese

Most languages with which we are familiar are written with an alphabet. The letters may be different from ours, as in the Greek alphabet, but the principle is the same: one letter for each consonant or vowel sound, more or less. Chinese, however, is written with "characters" which stand for whole syllables -- in fact, for whole syllables with particular meanings. Although there are only about thirteen hundred phonetically distinct syllables in standard Chinese, there are several thousand Chinese characters in everyday use, essentially one for each single-syllable unit of meaning. This means that many words have the same pronunciation but are written with different characters, as tiān, "sky," 天, and tiān, "to add," "to increase," 添. Chinese characters are often referred to as "ideographs" which suggests that they stand directly for ideas. But this is misleading. It is better to think of them as standing for the meaningful syllables of the spoken language.

Minimal literacy in Chinese calls for knowing about a thousand characters. These thousand characters, in combination, give a reading vocabulary of several thousand words. Full literacy calls for knowing some three thousand characters. In order to reduce the amount of time needed to learn characters, there has been a vast extension in the People's Republic of China (PRC) of the principle of character simplification, which has reduced the average number of strokes per character by half.

During the past century, various systems have been proposed for representing the sounds of Chinese with letters of the Roman alphabet. One of these romanizations, Hànyŭ Pīnyīn (literally "Chinese Language Spelling," generally called "Pinyin" in English), has been adopted officially in the PRC, with the short-term goal of teaching all students the Standard Chinese pronunciation of characters. A long-range goal is the use of Pinyin for written communication throughout the country. This is not possible, of course, until speakers across the nation have uniform pronunciations of Standard Chinese. For the time being, characters, which represent meaning, not pronunciation, are still the most widely accepted way of communicating in writing.

Pinyin uses all of the letters in our alphabet except "v," and adds the letter "ü." The spellings of some of the consonant sounds are rather arbitrary from our point of view, but for every consonant sound there is only one letter or one combination of letters, and vice versa. You will find that each vowel letter can stand for different vowel sounds, depending on what letters precede or follow it in the syllable. The four tones are indicated by accent marks over the vowels, and the Neutral tone by the absence of an accent mark:

High: mā

Falling: mà

Rising: má

Neutral: ma

Low: mǎ

One reason often given for the retention of characters is that they can be read, with the local pronunciation, by speakers of all the Chinese languages. Probably a stronger reason for retaining them is that the characters help keep alive distinctions of meaning between words, and connections of meaning between words, which are fading in the spoken language. On the other hand, a Cantonese could learn to speak Standard Chinese, and read it alphabetically, at least as easily as he can learn several thousand characters.

Pinyin is used throughout this course to provide a simple written representation of pronunciation. The characters, which are chiefly responsible for the reputation of Chinese as a difficult language, are taught separately.

BACKGROUND NOTES: ABOUT CHINESE CHARACTERS

Each Chinese character is written as a fixed sequence of strokes. There are very few basic types of strokes, each with its own prescribed direction, length, and contour. The dynamics of these strokes as written with a brush, the classical writing instrument, show up clearly even in printed characters. You can tell from the varying thickness of the stroke how the brush met the paper, how it swooped, and how it lifted; these effects are largely lost in characters written with a ball-point pen.

The sequence of strokes is of particular importance. Let's take the character for "mouth," pronounced kǒu. Here it is as normally written, with the order and directions of the strokes indicated.

Figure 2. Strokes order

If the character is written rapidly, in "running-style writing," one stroke glides into the next, like this.

Figure 3. Running style writing

If the strokes were written in any but the proper order, quite different distortions would take place as each stroke reflected the last and anticipated the next, and the character would be illegible.

The earliest surviving Chinese characters, inscribed on the Shang Dynasty "oracle bones" of about 1500 B.C. , already included characters that vent beyond simple pictorial representation. There are some characters in use today which are pictorial, like the character for "mouth." There are also some which are directly symbolic, like our Roman numerals I, II, and III. (The characters for these numbers — the first numbers you learn in this course — are like the Roman numerals turned on their sides.) There are some which are indirectly symbolic, like our Arabic numerals 1,2, and 3. But the most common type of character is complex, consisting of two parts: a "phonetic," which suggests the pronunciation, and a "radical," which broadly characterizes the meaning. Let's take the following character as an example.

Figure 4. Running style writing

This character means "ocean" and is pronounced yáng. The left side of the character, the three short strokes, is an abbreviation of a character which means "water" and is pronounced shuĭ. This is the "radical." It has been borrowed only for its meaning, "water." The right side of the character above is a character which means "sheep" and is pronounced yang. This is the "phonetic." It has been borrowed only for its sound value, yáng. A speaker of Chinese encountering the above character for the first time could probably figure out that the only Chinese word that sounds like yáng and means something like "water," is the word yáng meaning "ocean," We, as speakers of English, might not be able to figure it out. Moreover, phonetics and radicals seldom work as neatly as in this example. But we can still learn to make good use of these hints at sound and sense.

Many dictionaries classify characters in terms of the radicals. According to one of the two dictionary systems used, there are 176 radicals; in the other system, there are 2l4. There are over a thousand phonetics.

Chinese has traditionally been written vertically, from top to bottom of the page, starting on the right-hand side, with the pages bound so that the first page is where we would expect the last page to be. Nowadays, however, many Chinese publications paginate like Western publications, and the characters are written horizontally, from left to right.

BACKGROUND NOTES: ABOUT CHINESE PERSONAL NAMES AND TITLES

A Chinese personal name consists of two parts: a surname and a given name. There is no middle name. The order is the reverse of ours: surname first, given name last.

The most common pattern for Chinese names is a single-syllable surname followed by a two-syllable given name:[2]

Máo Zédōng (Mao Tse-tung)

Zhōu Enlái (Chou En-lai)

Jiǎng Jièshí (Chiang Kai-shek)

Sòng Qìnglíng (Soong Ch'ing-ling --- Mme Sun Yat-sen)

Sòng Mĕilíng (Soong Mei-ling--Mme Chiang Kai-shek)

It is not uncommon, however, for the given name to consist of a single syllable:

Zhŭ Dĕ (Chu Teh)

Lín Biāo (Lin Piao)

Hú Shì (Hu Shih)

Jiang Qĭng (Chiang Ch'ing—Mme Mao Tse-tung)

There are a few two-syllable surnames.

These are usually followed by single-syllable given names:

Sīmă Guāng (Ssu-ma Kuang)

Ōuyáng Xiū (Ou-yang Hsiu)

Zhūgĕ Liàng (Chu-ke Liang)

But two-syllable surnames may also be followed by two-syllable given names:

Sīmă Xiāngrú (Ssu-ma Hsiang-ju)

An exhaustive list of Chinese surnames includes several hundred written with a single character and several dozen written with two characters. Some single-syllable surnames sound exactly alike although written with different characters, and to distinguish them, the Chinese nay occasionally have to describe the character or "write" it with a finger on the palm of a hand. But the surnames that you are likely to encounter are fever than a hundred, and a handful of these are so common that they account for a good majority of China’s population.

Given names, as opposed to surnames, are not restricted to a limited list of characters, Men's names are often but not always distinguishable from women's; the difference, however, usually lies in the meaning of the characters and so is not readily apparent to the beginning student with a limited knowledge of characters.

Outside the People's Republic the traditional system of titles is still in use. These titles closely parallel our own "Mr.," "Mrs.," and "Miss." Notice, however, that all Chinese titles follow the name — either the full name or the surname alone — rather than preceding it.

The title "Mr." is Xiānsheng.

Mă Xiānsheng

Mă Mínglĭ Xiānsheng

The title "Mrs." is Tàitai. It follows the husband's full name or surname alone.

Mă Tàitai

Mă Mínglĭ Tàitai

The title "Miss" is Xiăojiĕ. The Ma family's grown daughter, Défēn, would be

Mă Xiăojiĕ

Mă Défēn Xiăojiĕ

Even traditionally, outside the People's Republic, a married woman does not take her husband's name in the same sense as in our culture. If Miss Fang Băolán marries Mr. Ma Mínglĭ, she becomes Mrs, Mă Mínglĭ, but at the same time she remains Fāng Băolán, She does not become Mă Băolán; there is no equivalent of "Mrs. Mary Smith." She may, however, add her husband's surname to her own full name and refer to herself as Mă Fāng Băolán. At work she is quite likely to continue as Miss Fāng.

These customs regarding names are still observed by many Chinese today in various parts of the world. The titles carry certain connotations, however, when used in the PRC today: Tàitai should not be used because it designates that woman as a member of the leisure class. Xiăojiĕ should not be used because it carries the connotation of being from a rich family.

In the People's Republic, the title "Comrade," Tóngzhì is used in place of the titles Xiānsheng, Tàitai, and Xiăojiĕ. Mă Mínglĭ would be:

Mă Tóngzhì

Mă Mínglĭ Tóngzhì

The title "Comrade" is applied to all, regardless of sex or marital status. A married woman does not take her husband's name in any sense. Mă Mínglĭ' s wife would be:

Fāng Tóngzhì

Fāng Băolán Tóngzhì

Children may be given either the mother's or the father's surname at birth. In some families one child has the father's surname, and another child has the mother's surname. Mă Mínglĭ's and Fāng Băolán's grown daughter could be

Mă Tŏngzhì

Mă Dĕfēn Tóngzhì

Their grown son could be

Fāng Tóngzhì

Fāng Zìqiáng Tóngzhì

Both in the PRC and elsewhere, of course, there are official titles and titles of respect in addition to the common titles we have discussed here. Several of these will be introduced later in the course.

The question of adapting foreign names to Chinese calls for special consideration. In the People's Republic the policy is to assign Chinese phonetic equivalents to foreign names. These approximations are often not as close phonetically as they might be, since the choice of appropriate written characters may bring in non-phonetic considerations. (An attempt is usually made when transliterating to use characters with attractive meanings.) For the most part, the resulting names do not at all resemble Chinese names. For example, the official version of "David Anderson" is Dàiwĕi Āndésēn.

An older approach, still in use outside the PRC, is to construct a valid Chinese name that suggests the foreign name phonetically. For example, "David Anderson" might be An Dàwèi.

Sometimes, when a foreign surname has the same meaning as a Chinese surname, semantic suggestiveness is chosen over phonetic suggestiveness. For example, Wáng, a common Chinese surname, means "king," so "Daniel King" might be rendered Wáng Dànián.

Students in this course will be given both the official PRC phonetic equivalents of their names and Chinese-style names.

[2] The first version of each example is in the Pinyin system of romanization. The second parenthesized version is the conventional, or anglicized, spelling.